Why you should be worried about facial recognition

Written By komlim puldel on Selasa, 16 September 2014 | 20.01

THE FBI has launched its "next generation" facial recognition system — and the implications are terrifying.

It not only draws on a database of criminal mugshots, it searches through ordinary people too.

Anyone who has ever had a background check when applying for a job could be identified in a police hunt.

Your face could appear during a police search for a criminal.Source: Supplied

And the system is hardly infallible — a search will pull up 50 faces, with only an 85 per cent likelihood that the suspect will be on list, by the FBI's own estimation.

The Interstate Photo System is expected to have reached 50 states by the end of the year, and have collected 52 million faces by 2015.

"This effort is a significant step forward for the criminal justice community in utilising biometrics as an investigative enabler," the FBI said in a statement.

And it may not be long until Australian biometrics become this far-reaching.

Digital finger printing and facial recognition has been in use in Australia for years.Source: News Limited

In NSW, a system called PhotoTrac has been matching CCTV footage and photos to a criminal database since 2011.

Victoria Police have been using the iFace biometric system since 2010, with officers able to scan photos snapped on their mobiles in the street as well as pictures lifted from Facebook, according to IT News.

In 2012, privacy laws were changed so that scans taken for passports, driver's licences or nightclub entry could be stored in police and spy agency databases, in what was slammed as a Big Brother-style development.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has already said that $158 million "eGate" departure gate scanners will be rolled out mid-next year.

Biometric "eGate" scanners will be rolled out in Australian airports next year.Source: News Corp Australia

The FBI's Next Generation Identification system simply takes the technology one step further.

It aims to eventually replace fingerprinting with a complex array of biometrics, assigning everyone with a "Universal Control Number", in what sounds like a plotline from a sci-fi movie.

"One of the risks here, without assessing the privacy considerations, is the prospect of mission creep with the use of biometric identifiers," Jeramie Scott, national security counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the National Journal in June.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in that same month that the National Security Agency pulls in millions of images to aid its own facial recognition program.

The IPS had some success last month, The Verge reported, when a child sex abuse fugitive was caught when he applied for a visa at the US embassy in Nepal.

It still compares poorly with Facebook's DeepFace system, which can tell you with 97 per cent accuracy whether two pictures are of the same person. But authorities using the social network's technology could only be a court order away.

Besides, the FBI has disclaimed responsibility for the accuracy of the IPS, stating that the list "is an investigative lead not an identification."

It would seem we need to keep a close eye on the surveillance methods coming soon to our hometowns.